Suspect Charged In Horrific Murder Of Puerto Rican Gay Teen
While this isn't related to gaming, I wanted to take a second to post something about an issue that might have missed the radar for some of the readers here. This story has only recently begun to receive mainstream attention.
So if you're interested in reading a bit of topical news that has absolutely nothing to do with gaming but everything to do with young gay men, read on.
Last week the body of 19 year old Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was found on the side of a road in central Puerto Rico. The body had been decapitated, dismembered and partially burned. Both of his arms and legs had been severed, an attempt had been made to do the same with his torso, and the entirety of his body had been dumped off of an isolated street. Jorge was openly gay, well liked and very popular. From a posting to CNN's iReport, a resident of Puerto Rico stated that despite the issue being talked about vocally within the gay community there and despite outcries for action, the story went unreported until it became an international issue. Soon after the details of Jorge's sexuality began to emerge, one of the officers on the case made a public statement implying that the victim "had it coming" because of the lifestyle he "chose." Thankfully, because of the outrage of the Puerto Rican LGBT community, it appears this officer has been removed from the case and reprimanded for his comments.
By Wednesday a suspect had been apprehended and was charged for the crime. Juan A. Martinez Matos was interrogated by police and confessed that he picked the victim up off of the street and offered him cash for sex; allegedly he initially believed the victim was a woman, and when he discovered that wasn't the case had a violent reaction. During an altercation between the two, Martinez Matos claimed the victim pulled a knife first. The typical "gay panic" defense here is being used; Martinez Matos claimed that he regressed to an incident when he was sexually assaulted during an earlier stint in prison, leading to the conflict between them:
Martinez Matos was "looking for women" in a red light district last Friday. He had already been turned down several times, but Lopez Mercado, wearing a blue dress and boots, agreed to get in his car.District Attorney Jose J. Bermudez says that in his confession, Martinez Matos said that he thought Lopez Mercado was a woman. The victim asked him for money and when he refused, Lopez Mercado pulled out a knife. When Martinez Matos realized that the teenager was actually male, he had a flashback to when he was raped in prison while he was serving a sentence for domestic violence. He then attacked Lopez Mercado, separating his arms from his torso.
Police found a wig, a knife, a burned mattress, a burned PVC pipe and blood on the wall where the murder took place.
Activists within Puerto Rico are asking the media to focus on the crime and not the behavior of the victim. With the recent passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, federal agencies are working with local officials to determine whether or not this will be tried as a hate crime. If it is, it will mark the first case to be tried under this provision. A lot of commentary is claiming that if not for the efforts of the LGBT community within Puerto Rico and worldwide to break this story, it would have remained largely ignored.
With every step towards equality we make, it's easy to begin to forget the difficulties we actually face as a community in the larger picture. It's easy to become complacent and forget the stark reality dealt with by so many people simply because of who they are; not just in countries like Iran, but in the United States and the UK where we don't "expect" this stuff to happen. It's easy to forget the people we've lost who paved the road towards us being able to be ourselves in the open in the first place. With every act of violence against our community, with every murder and suicide, we have to reaffirm our awareness and desire to ensure that tragedies like this are stopped permanently.
From everyone here we send best wishes and support to Jorge's family and hope that he receives justice for this abhorrent crime.
mixvio
Posted to Miscellany on 20 November 2009
· Comments (15)
Other stuff like this: hate, hate crimes, homophobia, Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado
I just read at Afterelton that his bail is going to be 4 million. Disgusting person!
Um okay. For the sake of fairness, the investigator did NOT say he "had it coming" because of the lifestyle he "chose". And FYI when you are saying someone *implied* something, it's generally not a good idea to write what you think they were implying IN QUOTES as if it's what they actually said.
This really bugs me because I don't think it helps anything. At. All.
What the investigator said was callous and poorly worded, but not exactly what a lot of gay blogs are reporting it as. He said:
"People who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen."
Jorge wasn't just your average gay man, he dressed in drag and may have been trans, or genderqueer. People who are going to cross gender boundaries in public and do things like get into cars with complete strangers do need o be aware that there is an immense amount of irrational hatred and stupidity out there. They need to be careful.
The investigator may be a homophobe - or he might just be like my dad, who, when he found out I was gay, told me I should keep it to myself and not come out publicly. When he told me that I was pissed off because I thought he meant something homophobic by it, but eventually I realized it was just his bone-headed way of saying "be careful", and warning me about the violence and stupidity out there.
Eshto, you read derailing for dummies? It sure seems so.
"People who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen."
Irrelevant coming from the police. At this point, he blamed the victim.
Don't you ever use your head and think? If a car is stolen, no police officer goes and says "People who lead the kind of car-owning lifestyle need to be aware that their car may be stolen", because it's completely irrelevant.
It's only said when the victim is being blamed.
So please, grow a brain and think before commenting. Mixvio reported this incident properly. In fact, the police officer comes off far too well. Victim blaming isn't okay.
The criminal is to blame for a crime. Period.
umm I have to say something that might make me sound terribly insensitive (which is definitely not true, just ask my partner), but does this really have any bearing on gay gaming? Of course I am aware of this horrific crime and I am definitely NOT belittling it, but I don't come to GayGamer.net to see hate crime stories.
Also, I'm not saying that the article is bad. Mixvio has done a good job of summarizing what is currently known about the crime (and I like all of what Mixvio has written so far on the site). But again what does it have to do with gay gaming?
We deal with this kind of homophobia all the time in the world. I come to GayGamer partly as escapism from all of that. Seeing this kind of heartbreaking news on GayGamer.net just doesn't seem like the right place for it.
I know this is a game related blog, but given this post I think I need to share this. My heart goes out to the victim and his family. No innocent person deserves this kind of cruelty. Why so much hate?
I used to work for this company for 3 years. I never had a problem with anyone until this person started to harass me in a very "silent" way. He of course told his co-workers that he didn't do anything. His co-worker were jamaicans he wasn't. The majority of people that work there are from there. I never had any problems with anybody but these people started spreading lies about me. Even some in management where really horrible towards me. Even thu I didn't do anything to them they just started to make fun of me and doing others stuff just to annoy me, intimidate and make my life miserable.
I had to switch jobs, make less money now, but at least I have recuperated some of my sanity.
And all this just because I'm gay.
I agree with all of the points that Eshto made - I don't think it's clear what the officer meant when he said "this type of lifestyle." He could have been referring to his sexuality (which, yes, would have been a bad way of wording it), or he could have been referring to prostitutes or transgender prostitutes (would does warrant a word of caution either way, cause both of those are dangerous roles to take in life).
I am sad hearing about what happened to this kid and wasn't aware of the story (thank you, mixvio, for posting this). I would advise, though, to be more careful in the quoting in future articles, as Eshto suggested. The officer's actual quote is very different than "he had it coming." Aside from that mis-quote, the article was a good read and very informative.
I am confused about a detail from the story, though. It says that "He then attacked Lopez Mercado, separating his arms from his torso." How exactly does that happen unless the guy was carrying an axe in his car? O_O . . . Unless of course, Superman is real and lives his life as a homophobic Puerto Rican . . .
@Eshto: I totally agree with you on the improper quotation usage.
Such a horrible crime - I hope the 'hate crime' angle is properly and fully investigated.
You know what, honestly I'm glad this is on GayGamer. I come here often times to wind down from my day and what not but the truth is that I also come here to be informed.
We should be aware of stuff like this because we need to be reminded to stay safe and to protect each other. There is no excuse as to why Jorge got into that man's car. As a community in Puerto Rican and everywhere else, we should flat out know better.
We're in a silent war. I truly, truly believe that.
I'm a bit conflicted here, because I do wish GayGamer took more time to actually cover gay issues instead of just gaming. But on the other hand, I'm not sure a gaming blog can be expected to be a source of information for sensitive social and political topics.
Then again, the misquoting problem (along with Mayu's implication that telling people to be careful out there somehow amounts to "blaming the victim") is appearing on several gay blogs that do specialize in news and politics.
So I hope GayGamer does make more of an effort to speak up on these things once in a while. Also, this might not specifically deal with gaming, but we could find ways to address it as a gaming community. Just as one totally random idea, how about those charity groups that raise money by playing Mario or Zelda for three days. Why can't gay gamers do that and donate the money to LGBT causes.
Like I said, totally random suggestion, all I'm trying to say is that there are other things we can do and support as a community of gay gamers, without necessarily requiring every single article here to be about video games.
As much as I appreciate this information. These kinds of stories do spread like wildfire of there own accord. It isn't entirely necessary to post this on a Gaming blog. I never took this site for being a gay site talking about gay issues. But more of a Gaming site foremost and then addressing gay issues within the Game community. (As well as a safe-(ish) avenue to be gay and a gamer.)
I say this because information like this is unavoidable when stuff like this occurs. Unless of course your living under a rock or have no Facebook gay friends (or they live under a rock as well) this information will get to us. There is very little to be said now about the incident other than its sad and scary.
Having said all that I do appreciate being notified although I heard about it a couple days ago.
Therefore I don't really need/want to comment on this subject matter unless its a gay gamer or involves gaming somehow. And in the future staying on the theme of gaming would be cool with me. Thank you Mixvio for this post though. It was informative and well done.
Thank you GayGamer for bringing this to our attention. It's stated on the mainpage that it's not gamer material, and stated in plain and simple english the fact it's not and if you want to read more, continue. I do not visit many gay-news sites since I am tired of the usual story that's played out there. Whether or not the quotes are correct or not, the story rings true that a gay man was murdered *HORRIFICLY*.
We may be taking steps forward but incidents like this are something we're soon to face more often due to conservative and wack-job lashback.
Again, thank you for posting this, GayGamer. I appreciate being alerted to serious issues.
I made the mistake of reading an interesting article and then not stopping before i read the comments.
Eshto:
There's been several translations of the officer's comments (the original was in Spanish) and all of them pretty much read like the classic line "You wouldn't have been raped if you hadn't worn that slutty dress." Saying that the victim wouldn't have been murdered if he'd "chosen" to be something else is absolutely inappropriate for an officer who's investigating the murder to state. That he appears to have been reprimanded for that line and removed the case shows someone else agreed that it was out of line as well.
To everyone else, no, this isn't related to gaming, and normally we don't bring up topical stories on this site that aren't related to its subject matter. But this has very real relation to the "gay" part of the site, and as such I thought that it was something important to write about in the midst of all the Xbox and PS3 games that we escape to for entertainment. It's very simple to forget how dangerous things absolutely still are for us and when terrible things like this happen I think that it's important for it to receive as much coverage as possible.
I don't understand how the "gay panic" defense even gets the time of day in a court any more? Would that ever be used to mitigate or justify a man killing a woman for an unwanted advance, or vice versa? Total garbage.
That said, I read about this enough on other gay sites and I can understand the sentiment of others trying to escape from this sort of sobering news here. In a way, it may even facilitate the motivation of hate crimes to terrorize the community indirectly through the murder of one of its members.
Yes we should avoid getting into cars with strangers and this is a good remind, but I'd say that applies to everyone, gay or straight.
I'm from Puerto Rico and it's sad to admit that our long history of rampant catholicism and machismo hasn't been very healthy for the Gay Rights movement. If only things were different, then Jorge would still be alive.
Thanks for giving this the media attention it deserves, mixvio, because if it wasn't for the international attention it's been given, no one would have found out about this heinous crime, and Jorge would have died for nothing.